NVIDIA GeForce GT 335M vs NVIDIA GeForce GT 320M

NVIDIA GeForce GT 335M

The Nvidia GeForce GT 335M (sometimes also called GeForce G335M) is a laptop graphics card for middle class gaming notebooks. It is based on the GT215 core (as the GTS 350M for example) but features only 72 shader cores and 24 Texture Mapping Units. Therefore, the GT 335M offers significantly more shaders than the GT 330M, but due to the low clock speed, the performance is not that much better. Compared to the GTS models, the GT 335M does not support GDDR5.

The 3D performance of the GT335M is on a level with the Mobility Radeon HD 5650 in the middle class. Therefore, the GPU is fast enough for all games in 2010. Demanding games like Metro 2033, Battlefield BC2 or Crysis run only in low-medium details fluently. Less demanding games like Call of Duty MW2 or Sims 3 can be played in high detail settings (see Benchmarks below).

As the other GeForce 300M cards, the GT335M offers Purevideo HD (VP4) to accelerate the decoding of HD videos. This means that the GPU offers the complete decoding of MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 ASP, VC-1/WMV9 and H.264 videos.

Furthermore, CUDA, OpenCL, and DirectX Compute allow the usage of the cores for general computing (e.g., encoding of videos).

NVIDIA GeForce GT 320M

The Nvidia GeForce GT 320M or GT320M was presented in the HP dv6t and dv7t series and should be based on a stripped down GT216 core with 24 instead of 48 shader cores.

Beware: The GT 320M should not be confused with the newer GeForce 320M in the Apple MacBook 13" 04/2010 laptops, which is a chipset graphics card.

In conjunction with the Nvidia 9100M G integrated graphics, the GT 320M supports Hybrid-SLI (only HybridPower). HybridPower is a technique to choose between the integrated and dedicated graphics core, if performance or battery runtime is needed. This works only in Windows Vista. Up to now the user has to use a tool to switch between the GPUs. Later Nvidia wants to switch automatically in the drivers. GeForceBoost is not supported with this card, as there would be no performance gain.

The GT 320M features 24 stream processors that do the graphic work of the vertex- and pixel-shaders. Nvidia Shaders are 1-dimensional and can therefore not be directly compared to the 5-dimensional shaders of AMD (HD 4650 e.g.).

The performance of the GT 320M is nearly on a level of the old GeForce 9600M GT (altough the 9600M GT features 32 shaders). Demanding Direct X 10 games like Crysis or Dirt 2 can only be played in low details fluently. Older games like Left 4 Dead can be played with high details fluently. More game benchmarks can be found below.

The GeForce GT 320M supports PureVideo HD (VP4) to decode HD videos with the GPU. H.264, VC-1, MPEG-2, and MPEG-4 ASP (DivX or xVID) can be fully decoded by the GPU. Futhermore, CUDA and DirectCompute are supported to use the processing power of the graphics card for other applications (with modern drivers). PhysX is currently not supported because of the low shader count.